Letting go of what?

“Well she bad mouthed about me, I don’t think I’ll talk to her anymore”

In most of our relationships, atleast the ones that we get to choose on our own, we go through different experiences and ups and downs most of the times. That relationship, which is static, rings the death knell sooner than later! What about those happy relationships and friendships that we enjoy through the course of life, however? Quite a few of these, unfortunately, end due to a host of reasons. Needless to say, such sudden and tragic endings hurt one a lot and leave a strong impact as well much of the times.

“Let go and move on” is the advice that I have heard the most frequently, all around. And ofcourse there are other advices too, ‘Time will heal’, ‘It was never worth it to begin with’, ‘Cry it out and let it be’. I will not get into disputing the ways in which one deals with such instances; to each his own. However, there is one thing that does make me wonder often, when I’m letting go of a person in essence, in any relationship, what exactly am I letting go off? Is it something about the person himself/herself or is more about the sort of comfort, intimacy and the camaraderie that I had with someone that I’m letting go off?

Talking in the abstract is not a very good idea maybe; it leaves a lot more to the imagination than one would be comfortable with. So I have this dearest of my friends that is a strong support system and a pillar for me to go on. You know, almost everyone has one such person in life, a mere thought of whom sometimes relieves us, or someone who really knows our deep dark thoughts and who knows us ‘in and out’, as the phrase goes. I’m glad I can boast of knowing two such people, before whom I can be naked in terms of thoughts, emotions and what all I do, where pretences do not have space for managing impressions and where certain things are taken with a pinch of salt but the mutuality of the relationship hardly suffers.

I’m probably going to have to let go of one such pillar, to a great extent. If life really went as we drove it around, oh well we would be living in utopia, but alas! So now, this unexpected and new development makes me wonder. I know I am and will be upset about the change for a long time to come, I also know I‘ll have a lot of difficulties in terms of doing certain things differently than before. But then, are the sorrow and the hurt about such a loss limited mainly to the inconvenience that is going to be caused by its absence? Is there something about the person himself/herself that I feel I will never be able to forget? Then, if I were to find someone who pretty much fits the bill and fulfils me emotionally in a very similar way, will I be able to deal with this hurt better, or for instance forget it completely? So then, was this always about the particular need or a set of needs that the person fulfilled than about the actual individual?